The New Warehouse Podcast Takes Zebra for a Test Drive
When Kevin Lawton, host of The New Warehouse Podcast, visited the Zebra Robotics demo center in San Jose, we didn’t just demonstrate Zebra Symmetry™ Fulfillment. We put him to work.
With just a few minutes of instruction, Kevin went through a complete warehouse workflow, from building a cart at induction to picking items in the warehouse and unloading finished orders at a packout station.
“I had minimal — minimal — training on this. So you can see how easy it is,” Lawton said after completing his first day on the job.
In addition to giving Kevin an immersive experience, I sat down with him and Cody Upp, Zebra’s head of commercial robotics sales and solutions, to record a full podcast episode. Here are some of the high points from our interview.
Decoupling Robots From Carts Drives Greater Cashflow
Goods-to-person (GTP) technology hasn’t really changed in more than 12 years. There are also physical speed limits that minimize the gains you can achieve with faster robots. Instead, we focused on workflow transformation by maximizing the utilization of both robotic and human assets to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
One of the key ways Zebra Symmetry Fulfillment eliminates bottlenecks and delivers digitized, automated, and intelligent operations is by combining autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) with detachable carts. This significantly increases utilization by eliminating robot idle times, especially at induction and packout.
“Decoupling the cart allows for so much evolution,” Lawton said. “The robots are there when they need to be there. And when they don’t need to be there, they’re doing work somewhere else.”
Detachable carts are one of the key elements that make it possible to reduce robot fleets by up to 30% without sacrificing quality, reliability and service levels.
Focusing on Fulfillment
Although the Zebra Robotics platform was designed for flexibility, we’ve made a strategic decision to concentrate our efforts on the person-to-goods (P2G) category. We took a lot of learning from many different markets and applied our insights to build a system that’s purely focused on fulfillment.
This decision came about because there’s a lot of labor activity in warehouse operations that’s difficult to optimize. We found that we could bring value to induction, picking and packout tasks right away, while also building a system that could expand into other areas of the warehouse over time.
Leveraging the Zebra Ecosystem
In addition to drawing on Zebra’s extensive design and user experience expertise, we have the benefit of seamlessly incorporating other mobility devices, which the company has been developing for more than a half-century.
Wearable computers and ring scanners are the first set of devices we’ve integrated into the system. By digitizing in this way, it becomes possible to optimize both worker and robot productivity. But this is only the beginning; a wide array of Zebra technologies can be leveraged as the system expands over time.
Empowering Workers and Warehouse Leaders
If you look at the AMR solutions that have been built to date, there are many areas where you don’t necessarily get the most out of your robots. AMRs sit idly at induction and packout. Operators often must search for the right robot because they don’t have all the contextual information they need at their fingertips. And facility managers don’t have all the insights they require at any given time.
These were all areas we focused on as we designed Zebra Symmetry Fulfillment. It’s engineered to reduce costs and wasted AMR time, improve the productivity of human workers, and provide facility managers with a “single pane of glass” so they can see what’s happening in their warehouses in real time.
The “Magic” of Team Intelligence
Kevin was amused when I described Team Intelligence, Zebra’s exclusive picking methodology, as a “magical picking experience”, but he was also impressed when he tried it out himself. We talked about how seamless and easy it is from a picker’s perspective, as well as how much goes on in the background to make the system work.
I explained how Symmetry evaluates all the orders in each wave and spreads the work out evenly among each picker to prevent congestion on the warehouse floor. It also ensures that picks are as close as possible to minimize walking. When allocating work, the system takes into account time, space and battery charge. Work is allocated not only to robots but to pickers, induction and packout workers. Finally, Team Intelligence coordinates the execution of the tours.
At any point in this process, rich data collection provides facility managers with a lot of insights into exactly what each asset is doing, what orders are picked, and what exceptions have been found; all of that can be accounted for and reported. Although the system is constantly replanning as new orders come in and the environment changes, from the picker’s perspective, all the complexity goes away.
“I can certainly see how that utilization overall is going to tie directly into and impact the bottom line of a fulfillment center,” Lawton said.
Watch Kevin Discover Just How Easy It Is
You can watch Kevin walk through the entire workflow in his demo video. To learn more about how Zebra Symmetry Fulfillment offers significant cost reduction and efficiency gains, including hints about the system’s future capabilities, check out the full interview on The New Warehouse Podcast.
